How to Make Money Homesteading: So You Can Enjoy a Secure, Self-Sufficient Life

Featuring profiles of 18 homesteaders and farmers who share stories of their own journeys toward a healthier, freer, more fulfilling lifestyle, this audiobook provides actionable ideas that you can use to achieve your dream of self-sufficiency. From how others got out of debt, to what to consider before buying land, to the steps to take when setting up a sustainable homestead or farmstead business, this book details the strategies that will save money, generate income, and put you on the path to self-sufficiency.

Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World

From farmer Joel Salatin's point of view, life in the 21st century just ain't normal. In Folks, This Ain't Normal, he discusses how far removed we are from the simple, sustainable joy that comes from living close to the land and the people we love.

The Accidental Farmers: An Urban Couple, a Rural Calling and a Dream of Farming in Harmony with Nature

This audiobook is the personal memoir of an urban couple's journey to farming rather than a how-to guide and is sure to delight those interested in moving to the country or simply learning more about the struggles of sustainable farming. When Tim and Liz Young decided to leave their comfortable suburban life and become first-time farmers in rural Georgia, they embarked on a journey that would change their lives.

Gaining Ground: A Story of Farmers' Markets, Local Food, and Saving the Family Farm

One fateful day in 1996, after discovering that five freight cars' worth of glittering corn have reaped a tiny profit of $18.16, young Forrest Pritchard vows to save his family's farm. What ensues-through hilarious encounters with all manner of livestock and colorful local characters-is a crash course in sustainable agriculture. Pritchard's biggest ally is his renegade father, who initially questions his son's career choice and rejects organic foods for sugary mainstream fare.

Growing a Farmer: How I Learned to Live Off the Land

When he purchased four acres of land on Vashon Island, Kurt Timmermeister was only looking for an affordable home near the restaurants he ran in Seattle. But as he slowly settled into his new property, he became awakened to the connection between what he ate and where it came from: a hive of bees provided honey, a young cow could give fresh milk, an apple orchard allowed him to make vinegar.

The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

Single, 30-something, and working as a writer in New York City, Kristin Kimball was living life as an adventure. But she was beginning to feel a sense of longing for a family and for home. When she interviewed a dynamic young farmer, her world changed. Kristin knew nothing about growing vegetables, let alone raising pigs and cattle and driving horses. But on an impulse, smitten, if not yet in love, she shed her city self and moved to 500 acres near Lake Champlain to start a new farm with him.

Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

In his articles and in best-selling books such as The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan has established himself as one of our most important and beloved writers on modern man's place in the natural world. A new literary classic, Second Nature has become a manifesto not just for gardeners but for environmentalists everywhere.

The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs: Respecting and Caring for All God's Creation

Joel Salatin is perhaps the nation's best known farmer, whose environmentally friendly, sustainable Polyface Farms has been featured in Food, Inc. and Time magazine. Now, in his first audiobook written for a faith audience, Salatin offers a deeply personal argument for earth stewardship and calls for fellow Christians to join him in looking to the Bible for a foodscape in line with spiritual truth.

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

"What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another, this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't. Today, as America confronts what can only be described as a national eating disorder, the omnivore's dilemma has returned with an atavistic vengeance.

The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

The Third Plate is chef Dan Barber’s extraordinary vision for a new future of American eating. After more than a decade spent investigating farming communities around the world in pursuit of singular flavor, Barber finally concluded that - for the sake of our food, our health, and the future of the land - America’s cuisine required a radical transformation.

Prodigal Summer

Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love within a larger tapestry of lives in southern Appalachia. At the heart of these intertwined narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches them from an isolated mountain cabin where she is caught off-guard by Eddie Bondo, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and her solitary life.

The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Ranchers Are Tending the Soil to Reverse Global Warming

In The Soil Will Save Us, journalist and bestselling author Kristin Ohlson makes an elegantly argued, passionate case for "our great green hope"—a way in which we can not only heal the land but also turn atmospheric carbon into beneficial soil carbon—and potentially reverse global warming. Her discoveries and vivid storytelling will revolutionize the way we think about our food, our landscapes, our plants, and our relationship to Earth.

Locally Laid: How We Built a Plucky, Industry-Changing Egg Farm - from Scratch

When Lucie Amundsen had a rare night out with her husband, she never imagined what he'd tell her over dinner - that his dream was to quit his office job (with benefits!) and start a commercial-scale pasture-raised egg farm. His entire agricultural experience consisted of raising five backyard hens, none of whom had yet laid a single egg. To create this pastured poultry ranch, the couple scrambles to acquire nearly 2,000 chickens - all named Lola.

Compost Everything: The Good Guide to Extreme Composting

If you're ready to throw out the rule book and return as much as you can to the soil, Compost Everything is the book for you. It's time to quit fighting Mother Nature and start working with her to recycle organic matter and create lush and beautiful gardens with some of the most extreme composting techniques known to man!

Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting

Last seen sleeping off his wedding night in the back of a 1951 International Harvester pickup, Michael Perry is now living in a rickety Wisconsin farmhouse. Faced with 37 acres of fallen fences and overgrown fields, and informed by his pregnant wife that she intends to deliver their baby at home, Perry plumbs his unorthodox childhood - his city-bred parents took in more than 100 foster children while running a ramshackle dairy farm - for clues to how to proceed as a farmer, a husband, and a father.

A Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929

Humans have been farming for thousands of years, and yet agriculture has undergone more fundamental changes in the past 80 years than in the previous several centuries. In 1900, 30 million American farmers tilled the soil or tended livestock; today there are fewer than 4.5 million farmers who feed a population four times larger than it was at the beginning of the century.

Flight Behavior

Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at 17. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media.

Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation

In Cooked, Michael Pollan explores the previously uncharted territory of his own kitchen. Here, he discovers the enduring power of the four classical elements - fire, water, air, and earth - to transform the stuff of nature into delicious things to eat and drink. Apprenticing himself to a succession of culinary masters, Pollan learns how to grill with fire, cook with liquid, bake bread, and ferment everything from cheese to beer. In the course of his journey, he discovers that the cook occupies a special place in the world....

In Defense of Food

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." These simple words go to the heart of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. Humans used to know how to eat well, Pollan argues. But the balanced dietary lessons that were once passed down through generations have been confused, complicated, and distorted by food industry marketers, nutritional scientists, and journalists-all of whom have much to gain from our dietary confusion.

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer

Novella Carpenter loves cities - the culture, the crowds, the energy. At the same time, she can't shake the fact that she is the daughter of two back-to-the-land hippies who taught her to love nature and eat vegetables. Ambivalent about repeating her parents' disastrous mistakes, yet drawn to the idea of backyard self-sufficiency, Carpenter decided that it might be possible to have it both ways.

The Lacuna

Born in the United States, but reared in Mexico, Harrison Shepherd finds precarious shelter but no sense of home on his thrilling odyssey. Life is whatever he learns from housekeepers and, one fateful day, by mixing plaster for famed muralist Diego Rivera. When he goes to work for Rivera, his wife, exotic artist Kahlo, and exiled leader Lev Trotsky, Shepherd inadvertently casts his lot with art and revolution.

The Hidden Half of Nature: The Microbial Roots of Life and Health

A riveting exploration of how microbes are transforming the way we see nature and ourselves - and could revolutionize agriculture and medicine. Prepare to set aside what you think you know about yourself and microbes. Good health - for people and for plants - depends on Earth's smallest creatures. The Hidden Half of Nature tells the story of our tangled relationship with microbes and their potential to revolutionize agriculture and medicine, from garden to gut.

The Botany of Desire

Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers' genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship.

The Art of Fermentation: An In-Depth Exploration of Essential Concepts and Processes from Around the World

The Art of Fermentation is the most comprehensive guide to do-it-yourself home fermentation ever published. Sandor Ellix Katz presents the concepts and processes behind fermentation in ways that are simple enough to guide listeners through their first experience making sauerkraut, and in-depth enough to provide greater understanding for experienced practitioners. While Katz contextualizes fermentation in terms of biological and cultural evolution, nutrition, and even economics, this is primarily a compendium of practical information.

Publisher's Summary

When Barbara Kingsolver and her family move from suburban Arizona to rural Appalachia, they take on a new challenge: to spend a year on a locally-produced diet, paying close attention to the provenance of all they consume.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle follows the family through the first year of their experiment. They find themselves eager to move away from the typical food scenario of American families: a refrigerator packed with processed, factory-farmed foods transported long distances using nonrenewable fuels. In their search for another way to eat and live, they begin to recover what Kingsolver considers our nation's lost appreciation for farms and the natural processes of food production. Americans spend less of their income on food than has any culture in the history of the world, but they pay dearly in other ways: losing the flavors, diversity, and creative food cultures of earlier times. The environmental costs are also high, and the nutritional sacrifice is undeniable: on our modern industrial food supply, Americans are now raising the first generation of children to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

Part memoir and part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

I really enjoyed listening to this book. I'm actually glad that I listened to it instead of reading it--I think listening forced me to slow down and really absorb everything the book says (I tend to read pretty fast). The juxtaposition of the different voices of the authors (Barbara K., Stephen H. and Camille K.) worked very nicely. Some of the points do get repeated a bit throughout the book, which did get a little annoying. However, that did not interfere with my enjoyment.

The book struck such a chord with me. When I was a child, there wasn't so much transportation of produce and I do remember how excited my mother would get when certain things came "in season." This book really brought all that back. I wish I had read this book in August or July, instead of November! I also appreciated the insight into the corporate food industry. The book makes me want to investigate further.

Totally enjoyable and informative! Wasn't sure I wanted to read another book about food and organics, but I'm very glad my friends encouraged that I do so. I didn't particularly enjoy the author's personal narration. As a gardener, food preserver and one who cares greatly about nutrition and good eating, it was very good. As one who owns and loves animals, the chicken and turkey tales were great. Don't miss this book if you care about food sources and learning how easy it is to prepare good food - and how this family did it.

Since reading this book I can't reach for a pepper at the grocery store without wondering where it came from, how many miles it traveled, or how it was grown. In fact, I only buy my produce from my local farmer's market and am learning to eat seasonally. How and what I eat hasn't been the same since finishing this book - Barbara Kingsolver invites an intellectual conversation back into the American diet, after decades of forfeiting our knowledge about what's in our food over to the food processing plants and agricultural system. In our hustling bustling lives of today we must learn to take pause and give more thought to what gets us through day by day - our food. This book is a great way to stimulate how you think about what you eat and your relationship with food. Kingsolver's self narration of her book is charming and one of the best I've heard. If you enjoyed Michael Pollen's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" you'll love this book even more.

I think I agree with other reviews that this particular book might be best left to print rather than spoken word.

Likes:
I already knew I liked Barbara Kingsolver's books and her particular viewpoint resonates with me. Her knowledgeable and thoughtful observations were well-stated but not dry. She skillfully and lyrically describes the wonder of watching vegetables and animals grow and ponders the ethics and traditions of our food choices. And EATING! The descriptions of mouth-watering meals made me hungry!

Dislikes:
I personally didn't respond to the contributions of her husband and daughter in this audiobook. I thought their voices interrupted the narrative and imagine that in the printed text these are sidebars - extras that could be skipped over if you already "got it" that you should only buy fair-trade coffee and that meat from supermarkets is from mistreated animals. There is a preachiness here that even I found tedious as much as I might be in agreement with the POV.

I think this book could have stood a lot of editing and found it difficult to finish, even though I appreciated the insight into her family's 'experiment'.

I had just finished reading "Cooked" by Michael Pollan, so I downloaded this book which had been on my wish list for a while. I also recently listened to "Flight Bahavior" and really liked Barbara Kingsolver as the narrator. I was immediately pulled in to the narrative of their year of eating deliberately. I felt really inspired, and realized I was ready for this book.

Some people found its tone a bit preachy, but it appealed to me because it just made so much sense, as did "Cooked." I started buying nearly all my meat, dairy and produce from our Saturday morning farmers market, and whole wheat bread from a local bakery, as Pollan suggested. I just finally got that Big Agribusiness doesn't much care how healthy and environmentally responsible the products they produce are.

A supermarket tomato sold in February is inedible and buying it is just dumb. I'm trying not to bore my friends and family; my daughter gives me the eye-roll. I've started to really enjoy meal planning and cooking, and for those of you who are ready for this message, read this book!

This was my first audio book on audible. I LOVED it. I am very picky about my narrators, and the fact that it was the author herself made it that much better. I have the print version of the book but I just could not get into it like other Kingsolver books. So I downloaded the audio version and I can't stop listening! After I finished I just started it again! This book is so inspiring I would look for any recommendations of books just like it. Kingsolver's words are just so poetic that it makes you wish you were there with her canning tomatoes, working in the garden, hunting in the morel patch. I am kind of disappointed that my first audiobook was such a success, because now it is going to be hard to top it.

I'm a mom. I have drama in my life. I don't want books with the F-bomb, nor graphic violence. I read for fun and to bring my family together. I read for reducing stress levels. We have never had a television in our home and our children are now mid twenties to 19. We listen together and look for belly-wrenching laughter. So what is it like to live without a TV? Awesomely educational and inspirational. Each new book is a marvel.

I gave this audio book 5 stars for the reading, the content and humor along the way. At times, some of the content was too preacher-like and demeaning to the intelligence of common folk. I have overlooked these areas because the overall approach of becoming aware is the most critical part of the book. It certainly takes a cold-turkey jump into buying locally to really appreciate all we (technologically advanced countries) have taken for granted.

While not everyone needs to follow her footsteps, it was the learning curve needed to be able to share this topic with others.

So, if you like to be respectful to the Earth, but you won't scream at the woman wearing a silk blouse, or berate the cowboy for wearing leather boots, then this book should be enjoyable. As with all audiobooks, which is very different than a physical paper book, the reading is the key. The book was read by the author, her husband and daughter, and the tone was pleasing. I could not have finished this book if the author were to have read with a hell, fire and damnation tone.
For this reason alone, I give 5 stars!

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is an interesting story of a year-long experiment with eating wholesome, locally grown food, eliminating almost all foods coming from another state or region. There is much to be learned from their experiment. This is also a good read. Kingsolver tells a tale well, whatever the tale.

Barbara Kingsolver and her family created an excellent memoir of their experiences becoming more acquainted with their food lifestyle. The story is compelling, entertaining, and inspiring. I'm ready for change and this book helps show how easy it is to become more in control of your health and nutrition just by selecting food based on the real costs to our environment and our lives. A must read for anyone interested in a healthy, environmentally sustainable life-style.

I live in Northern New Hampshire on a working farm where we raise all our own meat..some of our vegetables and all of our eggs and milk. I could indentify with many of the tasks and experiences of the Kingsolver/Hoppe family. I enjoyed every minute of the book and re-listened several times while weeding, cleaning etc. I have recommended it to many of my friends...two of whom (In CT and NM) had purchased the print copy in early May and enjoyed it as well.